Colin Geoffrey Hales wrote:
>> I understand that there is a difference between sensing and perception.
>> Perception includes sensing and also interpreting the sensations in a
>> model of the world. Which is why unusual appearances can literally be
>> difficult to perceive. But you still have not said why a digital computer
>> cannot have an internal model and modify that model based on sensory data.
>>
>> Brent Meeker
>
> If all you have is a bunch of numbers (or 4-20mA current loop signals or
> 1-5V signals) dancing away, and you have no a-priori knowledge of the
> external world, how are you to create any sort of model of the external
> world in the first place? You don't even know it is there. That is the
> world devoid of phenomenal consciousness.
You could say exactly same thing about a bunch of neurons and chemicals. Yet they produce consciousness.
> If humans give you a model. You still don't know what it is about. It's
> just a bunch of rules (when this input does this, do that...and so on).
> None of which is an experience. None of which gives you any innate
> awareness of the external world.
If you can learn and act you do know what it is about. You're just making an assertion that none of it is experience or innate awareness.
> That's why a real phenomenon happening in your head that innately connects
> to the real phenomemona in the external natural world and constructs an
> experienced representation of it, devoid of all knowledge 'about it', is
> necessary before you can know anything "about" it _at all_.
Unsupported assertion.
> There is a natural tendency to anthropomorphise our experiences into the
> artifact. Imagine yourself in a black silent room with a bunch of numbers
> streaming by and a bunch of dials you can use to send numbers back out.
> Now tell me how you can ever deduce the real external world from all those
> numbers. You can't. You can say 'when I poke this dial that number over
> there does that'. That is your whole universe.
>
> You have to stop thinking like a human and really imagine 'what it is
> like' to be a zombie.
To imagine is to create an internal model - so imagining what it is like to be a zombie seems to be a contradiction in terms.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Sat Nov 25 2006 - 02:58:06 PST